Publications
Below you will find a few recent publications. You can find an archive of all my publications on the SCG website, including bibtex references and downloadable PDFs.
You can find citation data on Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar. Alternative bibtex references are available from DBLP.
My Erdös number is 3: Oscar Nierstrasz — David M. Jackson — E. Rodney Canfield — Paul Erdös
Some recent publications
You can also find my articles on my Google Scholar profile.
Moldable Exceptions
Published in Proceedings of Onward! 2024, 2024
In this paper we introduce “moldable exceptions”, a lightweight mechanism to adapt a debugger‘s interface based on contextual information provided by a raised exception.
Recommended citation: Andrei Chiş and Oscar Nierstrasz and Tudor Gîrba, Moldable Exceptions, Proceedings of Onward! 2024 https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.00465
Automated Generation of Code Contracts — Generative AI to the Rescue?
Published in GPCE 2024: Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on Generative programming and component engineering, 2024
This paper examines the potential of Generative AI to automatically generate code contracts in terms of pre- and postconditions for any Java project without requiring any additional auxiliary artifact.
Recommended citation: Sandra Greiner and Noah Bülmann and Manuel Ohrndorf and Christos Tsigkanos and Oscar Nierstrasz and Timo Kehrer, Automated Generation of Code Contracts — Generative AI to the Rescue?, GPCE 2024: Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on Generative programming and component engineering, 2024 http://scg.unibe.ch/archive/papers/Grei24a-CodeContracts.pdf
Example-driven development: bridging tests and documentation
Published in Live 2024, co-located with SPLASH 2024, 2024
We show (i) how Example-Driven Development (EDD) enriches TDD with live programming, (ii) how examples can be molded with tiny tools to answer analysis questions, and (iii) how examples can be embedded within live documentation to make a system explainable.
Recommended citation: Oscar Nierstrasz and Andrei Chiş and Tudor Gîrba, Example-driven development: bridging tests and documentation, 2024, presented at Live 2024, co-located with SPLASH 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.00514
The Hidden Costs of Automation: An Empirical Study on GitHub Actions Workflow Maintenance
Published in SCAM 2024 (IEEE 24th International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation), 2024
This paper presents a large-scale empirical investigation towards characterizing the maintenance of GA workflows by studying the evolution of workflow files in almost 200 mature GitHub projects across ten programming languages.
Recommended citation: Pablo Valenzuela-Toledo and Alexandre Bergel and Timo Kehrer and Oscar Nierstrasz, The Hidden Costs of Automation: An Empirical Study on GitHub Actions Workflow Maintenance, Proceedings of SCAM 2024 (IEEE 24th International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation), 2024 https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.02366
Moldable Development Patterns
Published in Proceedings of EuroPLoP 2024, 2024
Based on several years of experience of applying moldable development to both open-source and industrial systems, we have identified several mutually supporting patterns to explain how moldable development works in practice.
Recommended citation: Oscar Nierstrasz and Tudor Gîrba, Moldable Development Patterns, Proceedings of EuroPLoP 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.18811
Exploring GitHub Actions through EGAD: An Experience Report
Published in International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies (IWST 23), 2023
We present our experience developing and using EGAD (Explorable GitHub Action Domain Model) and share valuable insights we gained. Our focus is on three key areas: (i) onboarding of Glamorous Toolkit (GT), (ii) creating a comprehensive and explorable domain model of GA, and (iii) highlighting the potential of EGAD as a research workbench.
Recommended citation: Pablo Valenzuela-Toledo and Alexandre Bergel and Timo Kehrer and Oscar Nierstrasz, Exploring GitHub Actions through EGAD: An Experience Report, IWST 23: Proceedings of International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies, 2023. https://scg.unibe.ch/archive/papers/Vale23b.pdf
EGAD: A moldable tool for GitHub Action analysis
Published in 14th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2023), 2023
We present our preliminary steps in building EGAD (Explorable GitHub Action Domain Model), a moldable domain-specific tool to depict and analyze detailed GA workflow data.
Recommended citation: Pablo Valenzuela-Toledo and Alexandre Bergel and Timo Kehrer and Oscar Nierstrasz, EGAD: A moldable tool for GitHub Action analysis, Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 23), 2023. https://scg.unibe.ch/archive/papers/Vale23a.pdf
A decade of code comment quality assessment: A systematic literature review
Published in Journal of Systems and Software, 2023
We present a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of the last decade of research in SE.
Recommended citation: Pooja Rani and Arianna Blasi and Nataliia Stulova and Sebastiano Panichella and Alessandra Gorla and Oscar Nierstrasz, A decade of code comment quality assessment: A systematic literature review, Journal of Systems and Software, 195, January 2023. https://www.oscar.nierstrasz.org/files/publications/Rani22c-ADecadeOfCodeCommentQualityAssessment.pdf
Making Systems Explainable
Published in VISSOFT, 2022
In this keynote presentation, we will show how software systems can be made explainable with the help of three interacting technologies.
Recommended citation: Oscar Nierstrasz and Tudor Gîrba, Making Systems Explainable, VISSOFT 22: Proceedings of the 10th IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization, IEEE, 2022. https://www.oscar.nierstrasz.org/files/publications/Nier22a-ExplainableSystems.pdf